"I just didn't have any information then. I thought I would grow out of feeling like this," she said.

In 1997, Ms Ler, who was still a man, fell in love with a woman and got married.

The couple got divorced in 2008. They have a daughter who lives with her mother.

Ms Ler said the divorce was unrelated to her transition.

She said: "(My former wife) didn't even know that I had such thoughts at all."

But it was also around that time that Ms Ler learnt from the Internet that she might be suffering from gender identity disorder, a medical condition in which a person does not identify with the sex they were assigned with at birth.

Then Mr Ling came across her Facebook page by accident and they started chatting. He said: "I remembered her from before. She had tried to correct my insensitivity and I thought that was quite considerate of her."